... The Novel “The House on Mango Street,” takes the one on a journey through the eyes of a young girl named Esperanza. Initially, Esperanza appears to be an unreliable narrator because of the characters oblivious actions and the authors writing style and use of vignettes. However, the concise and brief approach gives the story more depth and allows one to become immersed in the story. The novel becomes animated with Cisneros less is more approach; the imagination springs alive with the minimal details. Cisneros emphasis is the fact that Esperanza’s perception changes throughout the story. Esperanza is on a pursuit to find herself and her true identity as she becomes a woman. In the story, the author explains how Esperanza feels that she is being held back by her social standing. Cisneros shows that Esperanza’s families’ social status is at a disadvantage and that she fits the stereotypical Chicana profile. Cisneros highlighted this by Esperanza’s family and their poverty. Patriarchal standards are also present in the story and tells how women in her community are held back because of this. The story expresses how Esperanza develops and overcomes her identity issues; Esperanza achieves this by learning about the community she belongs to. Moreover, by Esperanza focusing on the bigger picture, which is how to overcome the expectations that have been assumed to her. The narrator feels as if she does not belong to the community, and she dreams of leaving Mango Street. However, the experiences...
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...Simon Adelle UCOR 102 Paper 3 Professor Marcum Making It in A Man’s World April 29, 2013 “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros exposes the life of the main character, Esperanza, for one year as she struggles with trying to find her place in America as a Chicana young girl while also coming of age. The novel starts the day Esperanza and her family of six move into a house on Mango Street, and immediately she expresses her antipathy for not only the house, but also for the area in which they move into and the people around who judge them because of their ethnicity. The story is not told in the traditional format of a continuous story divided into chapters, but rather Cisneros uses forty-four vignettes to allow for the reader to fully understand why Esperanza has the struggles that she has. Along with Cisneros’ illustrating Esperanza’s looking for her identity through images of Esperanza’s thoughts and female obedience, symbolism of violence, legs, the Statue for Liberty, and Nenny, and diction of Spanish words, not using quotation marks, and a maturing tone, she also uses these them to permeate Esperanza’s desperation to leave Mango Street throughout the whole novel. Cisneros’ use of vignettes highlights important moments in Esperanza’s life that emphasize how she develops over the course of a year. Cisneros uses the brevity of the vignettes to enhance the imagery to give the most vivid image through her limited amount of words for...
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...anything from looks to traits. The House On Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is about a girl named Esperanza and her journey through life. Esperanza desperately wants to move off the street she lives on and in doing so she realizes many things about herself as well as who she is as a person. Identity is the most important theme in the novel because Esperanza’s identity change s, identity shapes who she is, and Esperanza discovers her cultural identity. The first reason why identity is the most important theme is because Esperanza’s identity changes. Alicia states, “ Like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you will come back too,” (Page 107). Esperanza responds with, “ Not me,” (Page...
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...knowing nothing else. As girls grow into women who grow into mothers who grow into grandmothers their purpose in life is laid out to them by men within a predetermined role made up of the oppressed domestic housewife. This role often constitutes the women to be a submissive creature to the male figures in her life. This assembly line of sorts makes it easy for these women to never question why this is all that can be given to them. Why do they accept this domestic submissive role? Do they realize that this role is holding them back or have they just learned to accept the role? Within this essay I will be looking at this mass production of submissive roles produced by men, specifically I will be analyzing the coming of age novel The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Within this novel the main character Esperanza Cordero moves from the country side of Mexico to an urban city in America in search of the American dream. She makes this move with her family when she is a young girl and as she...
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